Hair Dye and Frogs
by DragonSteel
Summary: Inspired by the Troy Rising series by John Ringo. Specifically, Live Free or Die. After the meteors, after the plagues, life goes on, even if it's not quite the same.


I just finished reading Live Free or Die, and I enjoyed it, a unique take on alien invasion, but because of the nature of the narrator and the focus of the story there were some aspects of the plagues and meteor strikes and the implications of them that I felt were unexplored or glossed over. Maybe they're explored more in the next books, I don't know, it bugged me enough that I had to write this before I got to them.

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The cold bite of late summer was in the air, and the trees wavered over whether or not they should shed their trees. Autumn and winter came earlier every year. Before the meteors it would have been unheard of for it to snow in July, but Maggie could see the occasional flake drifting by where she stood freezing her ass off in the line outside the grocery store. When she finally got inside she hurried to grab the last of the bread and eggs. She paused by the meat section, but except for some hot dogs it was empty. She hesitated too long, and a harried looking woman with children trailing after her rushed up and grabbed the packages before she made up her mind. The woman was blonde, pregnant, and even though the oldest child looked 6 or 7, she had to have been only in her early twenties. It was ridiculous really, a billion people had died and there were still food shortages. People were still starving because crops were failing or left untended or simply couldn't reach the people that needed them even though there were fewer mouths to feed.

The alcohol section was on the way to the cereal and Maggie couldn't resist going inside. She didn't bother even looking at the wine, although she used to love a glass of red wine with dinner. With most of the vineyards dying off in the weather changes wine was rare, expensive, and usually not very good. Instead, refusing to let herself feel guilty, she grabbed a bottle of vodka. After a quick sweep through the rest of the store for other basic foodstuffs and toilet paper, she stood in another line in front of the register. The gossip and news magazines gushed over the latest fashions and scandals. They were one of the things that hadn't changed much. She idly flipped through a magazine while waiting in line and saw that the percentage of teen pregnancies had gone up again, along with miscarriages and abortions. Middle schools were handing out condoms and home ec. was now required for female students. She hadn't taken home ec. when she was in school but the male journalist, who hadn't taken it either, thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.

At the cash register she handed over her rations card for the food and drink and paid for the toilet paper with her own money. Every family had a rations card, the amount of money on it depended on the size of the family. With two children and two adults they got $80 a week, but with the price of food what it was it usually didn't cover the whole week. The cashier didn't bother asking for Id when he swiped the vodka on the scanner; most of the people in the line had alcohol of some sort or another. Everybody had their ways of coping. At least she spent more money on food than on alcohol.

The whole thing, lines included, had taken an hour and a half, and it was about the time she picked the boys up from daycare. It was a government sponsored daycare and thankfully within walking distance of both the apartment and a bus stop. When the baby boom started more and more people had petitioned and protested for government daycares, but the government had been reluctant. A few years into the baby boom companies began realizing the percentage of their work force that was cutting back hours or quitting because of children and began to petition as well. The government had capitulated pretty quickly after that.

Her oldest was 5, with brown hair and hazel eyes, and had finally stopped waking them up every night with his crying when the second had been born and took over the crying for him. The youngest was now 2 years old, and blonde. She had been hoping for a girl when she had been pregnant, but when that wispy pale hair had begun growing she had been unspeakably relieved that he had been born a boy. Even if the hair darkened, which it probably would, she had heard what parents and other children said about blonde girls and how they were treated. Hell, all she had to do was walk down the street and see guys cornering blonde women and teenagers, hoping for an easy lay. Sometimes they did get that easy lay. Sometimes... well, rape wasn't exactly a practice that was dying out. Brown and black hair dyes were still being produced, and bought, at a prodigious rate for a reason, even if people said that blondes had more fun.

They knew her at the daycare and one of the workers went to get her children as she signed them out at the desk. It was getting dark- well, darker than it already was with all the dirt and clouds covering the sun, and she would need to make dinner when they got to the small apartment they called home whether Charles was there or not.

It was Charles' day off and he was off with his friends doing god knows what. Before, it would have been fishing or swimming in the creek, but now that was unsafe, and the fish were all gone. The officials said that it was contaminated by the dust and debris from the impacts, but everybody knew that the new factory just outside the city limits had something to do with it. Before, before the plagues, before the meteors, before the Glatun, the city would have been in an uproar, but now, who had the time? Not Maggie, and certainly not the government that used to do the inspections. It was a shame. She used to catch frogs with her brother at that creek, but her children might never even see a frog, they were so rare now.

"Mama look! Look!" She absently looked up and nodded at the dark haired child waving a block at her. The children were sweet, and she did love them, but… between the two of them and her job she was always exhausted. She had never been a real maternal sort. Growing up she had always assumed she would get married and have one, maybe two kids. That was what people did after all. But now it was like the whole world was baby crazy and, although she couldn't tell anyone, she was truthfully sick of the whole thing. She had bleached her hair for years before the plagues, but now… she was ungodly grateful that she wasn't a natural blonde. One of her cousins was a natural blonde. They used to be close, the only family still within an hours' drive, but now she couldn't stand to be in that house. If the children weren't screaming she and her husband were instead. The whole place was a mess that stank of diapers and exhaustion and resentment. Maggie took her daily pill and was grateful it worked. Even if all the neighbors and her family kept asking when she was going to have her next baby.

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So a couple things from the book inspired this; the simple fact that the amount of ash and dirt in the atmosphere would drastically change the weather and temperatures and effect crops and livestock, the book mentioning that the EPA no longer had a lot of authority or enforced restrictions, and of course the fact that the heats and baby boom were seen mainly from a male perspective, and mostly treated as a joke, with not a lot of thought to the cultural and personal implications for women.


End file.
